The Architectural Imaginary: Experimental Architecture of the 1970s

Prerequisites: GSD 4201-4206 or equivalent or post-professional-degree status (MArch 2, MDesS, etc). This course examines selected architecture practices and projects in the expanded decade of the 1970s — the period between 1966 and 1983. Lectures will focus on the work of Aldo Rossi, Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk, and Bernard Tschumi, but others will be discussed. The theoretical work of Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, and others will be invoked to help us interpret this material. Readings could be intense. The propositions of the class are these: 1. That the common vocation of the Experimental Architectures of the 1970s was the Autonomy Project. 2. That integral to the Autonomy Project was an undeveloped notion of City as architecture\'s determination and record. That while this notional City, at that time, was constructed on a linguistic model of typology, it now can be more accurately understood according to a materialist-psychoanalytic model of the Architectural Gaze or the Architectural Body without Organs. 3. That the Real of this Experimental Architecture was, therefore (all along), psycho-social Desire rather than form or language (as was thought). 4. That the Autonomy Project ended by 1983; that a certain kind of architecture itself ended. However, that always already latent in the machinery of the Experimental Architecture of the 1970s was a construction of architecture as the production of effects and affects that preceded, produced, and continues to exceed the current \'projective\' or \'post-critical\' intention.